JULY

      Július

 

 

Reading days tatter down

to dust in the library,

summer heat writing itself

as beads of sweat across

your body, dampening

all you touch.

I soothe your bronzed back in the evening

with a cold shower,

my tongue a brush

on canvas, painting myself

onto your taut, muscular chest.

Writing you into a poem.

 

 

 

NIGHTSWIMMER

      Nightswimmer

 

 

He dived naked into the pool,

drunk and clenching his arse,

opening a mirror with his hands

to slip into the reflection

 

and break it into bright pieces,

scattering them to swirl

under lamplight with each stroke

towards the concrete edge.

 

You sat in the dark on a sunlounger

watching his toned brown body

arc out of your life.

 

He will surface elsewhere

as you wake from the cold

unable to gather the pieces.

 

 

 

 

András Gerevich has published five collections of poetry in Hungarian and translated English-language poets into Hungarian including Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, and Frank O'Hara. He has taught Creative Writing, and Screenwriting, at Vassar College and Budapest Metropolitan University. A former president of the József Attila Kör, he edited the literary journals Kalligram and Chroma.

Andrew Fentham is a poet and translator based in Cornwall. His translations from contemporary Hungarian poets have appeared widely in journals and received a Spender Prize. The most recent pamphlet of his own poems is Hunglish (Broken Sleep, 2019).


HLO HU